Creating the Right Culture – Part 2

By Reg Scheepers

I was watching a gripping interview with Four-Star General Stanley A. McChrystal, the guy smiling in the picture. He’s the new Obama-appointed commander of US forces in Afghanistan.

You know, you can get a sense when someone speaks that, listen, now I must pay attention, this is not someone to be taken lightly. General McChrystal is clearly one of those.

He was talking, amongst other things, about how he creates the right culture in the units under his command and how the main difference between a great unit and an average unit is the expectations each member has for every other member in the unit.

General McChrystal has created a great culture of excellence, hard work, and reliability in his teams, but he now has the tremendous task of creating a favourable culture in an entire country, i.e. Afghanistan.

The strategy in a nutshell is, once you have an entire country with the right culture, in other words, an entire country accepting certain things as good, normal and beneficial to all, you can then start withdrawing the troops and they will gradually carry on and protect that culture.

So if General McChrystal has been entrusted by the US president to change the culture of an entire country (and he’s doing a great job so far), I think we can pay attention to what he has to say on the issue. Read more »

The Myth of Customer Loyalty

By Reg Scheepers

It’s Christmas time again.

I used to hate Christmas just because I hate being bombarded by the same old carols and adverts. I get so sick of them. But recently I’ve decided to drop my crap and embrace the Christmas spirit.

This time of year, people I’ve worked with send season’s greeting emails wishing me a merry Christmas and a prosperous new year.

As a side note…

I was compiling one of those same merry Christmas emails to send to my valued customers and then had a realisation. I removed all traces of merry Christmas, rewrote the email to wish them a prosperous 2010, told them a little about how we grew in 2009 thanks to their support, and saved the email in my drafts to send mid-January.

Why? Because if I send Merry Christmas, they say thanks, delete, go on holiday and forget me. If I send Prosperous New Year mid January, it’s the same best wishes from my sincere heart, but they’ll be reading it right at the point where they’re winding up to a new year.

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